Stanford University has one of the longest and most time-intensive supplements in American college admissions and, if their application numbers are any indication, this has done nothing to dissuade nearly 50,000 students from applying just last year. Stanford’s reputation as an intellectual, competitive, entrepreneurial, quirky California powerhouse—in academics and athletics—can make these essays feel even more challenging than they ought to be. The short and sweet version of our advice? Be yourself. You’ll find that an open, honest response bears much more fruit than a manufactured answer that targets what you think the reader wants to see.

Commonly uttered phrases at this time of year in the homes of high school seniors include:
“I don’t know what to write.”
“Nothing I write seems to sound at all different from what any other student would write.”
“Every sample essay I’ve ever read sounds so amazing, how am I ever going to sound that interesting?”
And my favorite: “I’ve never had a hardship or challenge in my life, what am I going to write about?”

Sound familiar?

College essay questions can sometimes feel like Miss America Pageant questions when students feel the pressure to sound like “the most perfect human being who has ever existed.”

The University of Virginia has always provided some of my favorite supplemental essay prompts (and not just because it’s where I went to grad school). They are short (250 words max) and they are personal. Both of these mean that a student is forced to get to their point quickly, something I find students struggle with when they have a longer word count, and they are forced to really think about what makes them tick.

If you look at all the available prompts offered in the first section of the UVa supplement, the theme would be this: What do you value? All four options essentially ask a student to address this larger question. Even the seemingly breezy, “what is your favorite word and why?” is essentially asking a student to give the reader a little insight into what they think is important. Because the four prompts focus on the same core question, let’s look more deeply at just one.

The University of Chicago’s essay prompts get a lot of attention, and rightfully so. They are typically some of the most interesting and thought provoking that an applicant will encounter. When I was an admissions officer at the University of Chicago, I would regularly hear from applicants that part of the reason they applied was those essay prompts—they couldn’t wait to grapple with them. By contrast, in my later life as a high school counselor, I’d hear from some students, “I don’t want to apply there—those essays look too hard!” Clearly, the essays are serving their purpose for the admissions office by attracting the right students, those who find Chicago’s eccentric brilliance (cough, nerdiness!) to be a match for their own spirit.

So let’s dig into the essay questions themselves. First, just like all supplemental essays at schools which read applications holistically, the Chicago essays should be understood as puzzle pieces that form part of a whole. Each essay fulfills a different part of the application, and each is important.

The supplemental essay as a whole usually gives application readers more insight into the student’s character and interests than the Common App does on its own. When I was an admissions officer at Tufts, this final essay was always my favorite; it provided the biggest and clearest window into the applicant’s personality. With the following six, very different, options to choose from, Tufts applicants got to write an essay they wanted to write, about something that actually mattered to them.

Colleges that accept the Common App don’t pick the essays it offers. They do, however, carefully choose each of their supplemental essays, which is why these are often considered as important, if not more important, than the Common App essay. What they ask can also tell you a bit about the college’s personality; think of off-the-wall creative topics like those the University of Chicago releases every year. How you choose to answer these essays also says a lot about you.

I work with a lot of students who apply to Wake Forest, and the Wake Forest app is one of my favorites. This may surprise you considering there are six (yes six!) supplemental short essay prompts. I like the prompts because they aren’t unnecessarily long and they are mostly very specific, which I find students usually prefer. Let’s take a look at two of them, identify the goal of the essay, and discuss some of the common pitfalls.

Phew, your main essay is done. You’ve done your drafts, really believe it shows who you are, and you’ve even given it to a College Coach expert for a final proof read. So what’s next? Tackling the supplemental essays. While some require only 100 to 150 words, others are another full length essay on top of that personal statement. Among the most common essay supplements is a simple question: “Why do you want to attend this college?”

While this is a simple question to ask, it’s honestly not an easy question to answer. The good news is that it shouldn’t be nearly as difficult as the personal statement you just wrote, and there’s plenty of research out there to support your efforts. Here are a few tips to help you approach these questions.

Part Three of a Three Part Series

Over the last few weeks I’ve shared a few tips on mastering the UC Application (be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2). To close out this series, today I’m sharing two of the most common essay mistakes I see UC applicants make.

Common Essay Mistakes

I’ve never counted, but I’ll estimate that I read over 100 different essays for the UC application each year. If that seems like a huge number, imagine being an admissions officer at UCLA, where over 112,000 students applied for fall admission last year.

College Coach Survey Reveals That 75 Percent of Students Accepted To Ivy League Colleges Responded to the Same Common App Prompt

April 1, 2015—In a startling discovery, College Coach’s nationwide survey of high school students who were accepted to Ivy League colleges almost overwhelmingly wrote their essays in response to prompt number 4, “Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?”

Over the last couple of weeks, essay review season has really started to pick up at College Coach. We’re diving into drafts each day, providing both the big picture ideas and the small-scale tips to help students find success with their college application essays. Our past blog entries have focused more on the big picture: how to approach the “failure” prompt from the Common App; ways you can effectively use the Additional Information section; brainstorming through writer’s block. Today I want to focus on the smallest of issues with college essays: the words you choose to use.

Write Like You Talk

Most students who come into my office have normal vocabularies. There’s a big word dropped here or there in reference to an idea they’ve discovered in school—maybe it’s existentialism or photosynthesis or even spectrophotometer—but multi-syllabic mouthfuls are rare when I’m just chatting with a student about what he cares about and why, and that’s the way it ought to be.

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